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IN THE WINTER of 401 B.C. a tired and defeated army of
Greek mercenaries was slowly making its way home from Mesopotamia, after
failing to topple the Persian king Artaxerxes II. Crossing the Taurus
Mountains, in what is today southeastern Turkey, the mercenaries were set upon
by bands of Carduchi, a fierce race of bowmen, who caused more harm to the
Greeks in seven days of hit-and-run raids than had the Persians during the
entire Mesopotamian campaign. An account of the harrowing retreat was provided
by Xenophon, one of the Greek commanding officers. Xenophon wrote that the
Carduchi lived in the mountains and were nor subject to outside authority:
"Indeed, a royal army of a hundred and twenty thousand had once invaded their
country, and not a man of them had got back...."

Not all that much has changed in 2,400 years. The Carduchi may well have been
what we now call Kurds, an Indo-European people, speaking a language akin to
Persian, who first occupied the Zagros and Taurus ranges in the second
millennium B.C. The Kurds are among history's greatest warriors: Saladin, the
Muslim general who repossessed Jerusalem and much of the Holy Land from the
Crusaders, was a Kurd. Their bows and slings have long since been replaced by
Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. Perched on
isolated slopes, amid oak and mountain ash, Kurdish guerrillas known as pesh
mergas ("those who are prepared to die") have in recent years wiped out
whole units of Turkish and Iraqi soldiers and Iranian revolutionary guards.
True to their past, the Kurds are a law unto themselves.

Although there are no trustworthy figures, it is estimated that upwards of 16
million Kurds inhabit an ellipse of territory that is larger than California
and that spreads over portions of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the Soviet
Union. (There is also a Kurdish community about 70,000 strong in Lebanon.) In
geopolitical terms the Kurds occupy one of the most tantalizing bits of real
estate on earth. The deserts of the Middle East and the plateaus of Central
Asia and Anatolia all ram up against the 10,000-foot massifs of Kurdistan ("the
land of the Kurds"). Between the southernmost Red Army units and the
northernmost of the great Arabian oil fields dwell the Kurds. More than 70
percent of Iraq's oil exports pass through Kurdistan on their way to the
Mediterranean; a pipeline to transport Iranian crude is soon to be built. In a
Kurdish region of southeastern Turkey one of the world's biggest hydroelectric
projects is under construction; Syrians fear that the project will drain the
Euphrates, on which Syria also depends, in order to irrigate Turkish farms.
Because statehood has always eluded them, the Kurds are hostage to the
strategies of others. A Kurdish terrorist group, believed to have been trained
in Syria, now constitutes Turkey's chief internal-security problem, according
to Turkish officials in Ankara. Other Kurdish guerrillas, supported by both
Syria and Iran, control much of northern Iraq. And pesh mergas assisted
by Iraq are the most militarily potent of the opposition forces inside Iran.
All these disparate groups have at one time or another enjoyed crucial
assistance from the Soviet Union, which not only is nearby but also has a long
tradition of expansion in the area. Although Kurdistan does not officially
exist as a state, a lesson in geopolitics could easily begin with the Kurds.
For decades their fortunes have served as a barometer of the stability of every
state in the region.

ACCORDING TO ONE legend, the Kurds are descended from 400 virgins who were
raped by devils on the way to King Solomon's court. Fatah Kavian, a member of
the central committee of the anti-Khomeini Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran,
smiled modestly when I mentioned the tale to him recently. "This may be true,"
he said. Kurds take satisfaction in their reputation as spoilers who, owing to
their total command of one of the world's harshest terrains, can never be
completely vanquished. Perhaps because they were a distinct people, with their
own language and culture, for at least 1,500 years before converting to Islam,
in the seventh century A.D., their religious affinity with Persians, Turks, and
Arabs has counted for little. If anything, religion has helped to estrange the
Kurds from their neighbors. Some Kurds from Iran flaunt their secular values as
a way of demonstrating their opposition to the ethnic Persian, Shiite theocracy
in Tehran. At every evening meal I took with Iranian pesh mergas in
northeastern Iraq during a recent trip, whiskey and beer were served. In
Turkey, however, a state founded on the fiercely secular principles of Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, Kurdish revolts have combined fundamentalism with nationalism.
Kurds in southeastern Turkey today distinguish themselves from Turks by strict
adherence to Muslim tradition. While polygamy is officially banned, many
Kurdish peasants in Turkey have more than one wife. Last May, during the holy
month of Ramadan, the only persons apparently not fasting in the ethnic Kurdish
town of Hakkari, near the Iran and Iraq borders, were the Turkish troops sent
there by Ankara.

Race and language aside, what seems to make a Kurd a Kurd is an almost
spiritual affinity with the beloved moors and snow-streaked mountains of
Kurdistan. As the first row of domed, yellowy hills appeared on the horizon,
rippling upward from the desert floor in northeastern Iraq, my Kurdish driver
glanced back at the desert, sucked his tongue in disdain, and said,
"Arabistan." Then, looking toward the hills, he murmured, "Kurdistan," and his
eyes lit up. But if geography helps to define the Kurds, it also helps to
divide them. The ranks of jagged peaks, with their walled-in valleys and
forbidding chasms, seal the Kurds off from one another as much as from the
outside world. Like the Scottish highlanders of previous centuries, the Kurds
are more an assemblage of clans than a united people. This disunity is
reflected in the myriad of Kurdish guerrilla armies fighting at cross-purposes,
making statehood an impossible dream.

Bad luck has abetted disunity. In the aftermath of the First World War the
Kurds came close to winning a state of their own. The 1920 Treaty of
Sèvres, whose purpose was to carve up and distribute the Ottoman Empire,
provided for a Kurdish homeland in eastern Turkey. The following year, however,
Kemal Ataturk defeated an invading Greek army and, by laying the groundwork for
a new, cohesive Turkish state in the Anatolian heartland, was able to demand
the treaty's revision. After the Second World War the Soviets, who had occupied
northern Iran, allowed for the establishment of a small pro-Moscow Kurdish
republic around the city of Mahabad. But as a result of Anglo-American pressure
and an increasing preoccupation with Eastern Europe and the Balkans, Stalin
abandoned his Iranian holdings at the end of 1946, leaving the Kurds at the
mercy of Reza Shah, the late Shah's father, who crushed the fledgling regime
and executed its leader, Ghazi Mohammed. To this day photos of Ghazi Mohammed
occupy a prominent place in Kurdish redoubts in Iraq and Iran.

Another influential figure in Mahabad, Mulla Mustafa Barzani, lived in exile
in the Soviet Union for more than a decade. Barzani later returned to lead
several rebellions in northern Iraq—supported covertly this time by the
United States, Israel, and Iran. The most serious of these rebellions broke out
in March of 1974, when the Iraqi regime had to use tanks and planes to repel
Barzani's forces. Following an agreement between Iraq and Iran in 1975, the
Shah withdrew his support from the Kurds and the revolt collapsed. The pesh
mergas retreated to their caves in the mountains, and Barzani went into
exile in the United States, where he died in 1979, in Washington, D.C.

The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in September of 1980 provided the Kurds with
another opportunity. As Iraqi troops were diverted to the war front in the
south, fewer were available to confront resurgent pesh mergas. Northern
Iraq is now a cauldron of Kurdish separatism. Heading north into the mountains
from the city of Sulaymaniyah, one comes to a point where the hitherto
ubiquitous billboard pictures of Iraq's President, Saddam Hussein At-Takriti,
suddenly vanish. So do Iraqi soldiers. Replacing them are pesh mergas
with bandoliers, wearing turbans, baggy trousers, vests, and cummerbunds.
According to the map it is still Iraq. But in this part of the country
Baghdad's writ is hardly law. The 2.5 million Kurds who live in Iraq make up
almost a fifth of the country's population. Most of them live in the mountains
of the oil-rich north, where their very presence calls into question the
viability of the Iraqi state. (Iraq was created after the First World War
through the ad hoc process of joining Turkey's ethnic-Kurdish Mosul province
with Arab Mesopotamia.) Although in Arabic the word Iraq means "well rooted,"
Iraq's shallow roots as a nation have been a factor in the psychological
insecurity that has given one Baghdad regime after another its perverse,
bloodthirsty quality. By all accounts, Iraqis are among the most greatly
oppressed people in the Arab world. Iraq's record of human-rights violations
includes the documented torture-related murder of several Kurdish youths, in
the fall of 1985. Of all the governments in the region, none has less control
over the Kurds than Baghdad. Even Iraq's own troops are a question mark, since
many of Iraq's irregular soldiers in the north are themselves ethnic Kurds --
known to pesh mergas as the josh ("sons of donkeys")—upon
whose loyalty Iraq cannot rely.

The mountains of northern Iraq are home to no fewer than five Kurdish
guerrilla armies. In the Turkish border area Mustafa Barzani's son, Massoud
Barzani, leads the Kurdish Democratic Party. The Ayatollah Khomeini is backing
the Barzani clan, as the Shah did in the early 1970s. Barzani is also receiving
support from Libya. Thus the KDP, a tool of American policy only fifteen years
ago, when it got help from the Shah, the United States, and Israel, is now very
much a tool of anti-American forces. Barzani's troops threaten Iraq's
international highway and oil pipeline to Turkey. Over to the east, near the
border with Iran, is Jalal Talebani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK),
backed by Iran and Syria. Talebani split with the Barzanis in 1975, but they
are now reconciled and both organizations are fighting Iraq. However, Talebani
is hosting on his territory another pesh mergas force, Abdel Rahman
Qassemlu's Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), which cooperates with
Iraq against Iran. The compact was explained to me by Said Badal, a Qassemlu
aide: "Our cooperation with Iraq is limited to the struggle with Iran, so that
does not necessarily make us enemies of Talebani, who is fighting Iraq."
Barzani's KDP, Talebani's PUK, and Qassemlu's KDPI can put into the field as
many as 10,000 pesh mergas each. The two other Kurdish groups, both Iranian in
origin but based in Iraq's northeastern border area, are much smaller, with
about 500 pesh mergas apiece: the Marxist-Leninist Komala, and the force
of Shaikh Ezzedin Hosseini. Hosseini, who was the Sunni Muslim leader of
Mahabad in the 1970s, now maintains a loose alliance with Qassemlu. The
complexity of the military situation becomes apparent at the KDPI command
center in the cliffside town of Gowreh-deh, five miles from the Iranian
border. Looking out over the deforested valley, one can see four different armies.

Crossing into Iran involves a fast march of two hours, by night, from a point
north of Gowreh-deh. The thud of Iraqi and Iranian artillery is heard
throughout. The two armies exchange fire from the mountain tops on each side of
the border; the valleys and defiles in between are controlled by Qassemlu's
Kurds. The KDPI is said to have fifteen staging posts on the Iranian side of
the border, from which it launches attacks as deep as a hundred miles into
Iran. "When darkness approaches, the pasdaran [Revolutionary Guards]
leave the towns and we enter to get food from the villagers," says Ahmed
Nastani, a pesh merga commander. "At night everything is free for us."
Iran's five million Kurds, who account for about 11 percent of the country's
population, are the second largest of all of Iran's ethnic minorities, after
the Azerbaijanis. The pesh merga rebellion, which appears to be
militarily more significant than that of the better-known Mujahidin
Khalq (a leftist, Persian-dominated organization led by Massoud Rajavi),
illuminates an aspect of the Iranian reality that has been more or less
obscured in recent years. Ethnic minorities, who also include Arabs, Baluchis,
and Turkomans, make up nearly half of Iran's population. Because some of these
people, like the Kurds, are not Shiites, Ayatollah Khomeini's brand of
nationalism is even more alienating than was that of the late Shah. As a
consequence, the mullahs' regime, after eight years, still has not managed to
consolidate its rule in the outlying minority regions to the extent that the
Shah was able to. Here may be where the authorities in Tehran are the most
vulnerable to foreign pressure and involvement.

THE LARGEST KURDISH population is in southeastern Turkey, where half the Kurds
in the world live. Although 15 percent of Turkey's 52 million people are
Kurdish, Turkish governments since Ataturk's have made no concession to the
Kurds. The Kurdish language is not taught in schools, and Kurdish broadcasts
and publications are banned. Officially, the Kurds don't even exist; the Ankara
government prefers to call them "eastern compatriots" or "mountain Turks."
Despite the size of the community, its history of revolt, and the extent of
government repression, for the first half of this decade the Kurds were less of
a menace to Ankara than they were to either of the two war-weakened regimes in
Baghdad and Tehran. A military coup in 1980—which occurred, coincidentally,
in the same month that Iran and Iraq went to war—gave Turkey a strong
central government better able to control the country's volatile southeast.

Lately, however, the situation has deteriorated. According to the Turkish
daily Hurriyet , more than 400 armed attacks by Kurdish guerrillas have
taken place in the past three years. Some 150 Turkish security officers and
several hundred civilians, many of them women and children, have been killed.
Turks see unsettling similarities between the recently quickening pace of
Kurdish attacks and the urban guerrilla activity in the late 1970s that led to
the coup. And because these attacks are happening at a time of increasing
democratization, people in Ankara, both in and out of government, are
discussing the Kurdish problem more openly and more honestly than ever
before.

Almost all the violence is done by the Kurdish Workers' Party, a self-declared
Marxist group that Western diplomats and others believe has, at most, a
thousand active fighters. The group assaults remote border-area villages, going
after anyone (often another Kurd) who has a close relative believed to be
cooperating with the Turkish authorities or who is believed to be doing so
himself. Its zeal in murdering civilians—in one instance, a grenade was
tossed down a house's chimney—has caused the Workers' Party to be branded
"terrorist." The Workers' Party leader, Abdullah Ocalan, is reported to be
living in Damascus. Turkish officials privately accuse Syria of training the
group, with Soviet-bloc help. Adnan Kahveci, the chief adviser to Turkey's
Prime Minister, Turgut Ozal, explained to me that "Syria has never been
favorable toward Turkey." He said that "a good argument" could be made for
describing the Workers' Party as a tool of Soviet and Syrian policy.

The Turks are now securing the Syrian border with barbed-wire fences and video
cameras. Nevertheless, officials in Ankara admit that terrorists based in Syria
(whose Kurdish population is more than half a million) can cross into Turkey by
way of Kurdish-controlled parts of northern Iraq. Given the forbiddingly
mountainous topography of the region, no one can say for certain that they're
not based inside Turkey itself, hiding in caves for months at a time. On
several occasions the Turkish air force has, with the consent of the Iraqi
government, bombed guerrilla hideouts across the border; the utility of these
raids is doubted.

Quite apart from the human toll taken by the Workers' Party, it presents an
economic threat. More than a third of Turkey's oil comes from the Kirkuk
fields, just across the border in Iraq. There is speculation that if Baghdad's
authority in the north weakens further, Ankara might attempt to occupy the
oil-rich Mosul province that Ataturk relinquished six decades ago. The tension
is palpable in Hakkari, a town of 20,000 people less than thirty miles from the
border with Iraq. The streets bristle with walkie-talkies and European-designed
G-l and G-3 rifles. Four separate security services patrol the streets, and
helicopters prowl the surrounding mountains.

Both Syria and the Soviet Union have ample incentive to harbor ill will toward
Turkey. Kahveci pointed out that the Syrians have never accepted Turkey's
incorporation, in 1939, of Hatay, a predominantly Arab province, located
strategically in the northeast corner of the Mediterranean; to this day
official Syrian maps do not recognize Turkey's sovereignty there. And Damascus
now sees another threat in the thirteen-dam South-East Anatolia Project,
scheduled to begin operation in the 1990s, in the vicinity of the
ethnic-Kurdish city of Diyarbakir. As observers in Ankara explained the problem
to me, although Turkey has declared that it has no intention of using Syrian
water, the Damascus government knows that the network of dams will give Turkey
the ability to do so.

Turkey is on less overtly hostile terms with the Soviet Union, but this
relationship remains deeply ambivalent. Turkey is a member of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization, yet its Bosporus Strait provides the only warm
water egress for the Soviet navy. Thus, even though the two countries are
traditionally enemies and now belong to opposing alliances, Moscow's official
dealings with Ankara have usually been correct. The ambivalence was evinced in
the 1970s when the Soviet Union, through its satellite Bulgaria, supplied arms
to various Turkish extremist factions, while at the same time giving Turkey
significant economic aid. Today, even as the Turkish-Soviet economic
relationship is again warming up, Moscow is broadcasting Kurdish-language radio
programs into southeastern Turkey, using a high-powered transmitter in Yerevan,
in Soviet Armenia. The content of these broadcasts is said to be more cultural
than political. But with Turkey's discontented Kurds wedged between the Soviet
Union and its ally Syria, there is no need for Moscow to be blatant.

ANKARA'S VULNERABILITY helps explain why the Turkish government has permitted
the Soviets to use an air-and-land corridor through eastern Turkey in order to
supply Iraq with military hardware. Throughout the seven-yearlong Gulf War,
Moscow has remained Iraq's principal arms supplier. Its motive is clear. An
Iranian victory would serve to improve the morale and the strength of the
mujahidin fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan: four of the seven
main Afghan resistance groups are fundamentalist, and many of their members are
Farsi-speaking like the Iranians, and look to the Shiite clergy in Tehran for
support.

Were Iraq to be defeated in the Gulf War, despite tremendous Soviet
military support, the various Kurdish guerrilla organizations, all of which
have left-leaning ideologies and have dealt with Moscow before, would
constitute the best available insurgency option for the Soviets—a way to
keep Iran weak and preoccupied, and thus in a position, as it is now, where
it needs to curry Moscow's favor. It is an option that the United States,
conceivably, could also employ as a means of pressuring the mullahs—much
as Washington used Barzani's Kurds in 1974 to pressure Iraq. Draw up any
scenario you please: the Kurds are available. Lacking a state of their
own, the Kurds thrive when all the existing states are in turmoil.